Chapter 4: They Already Hate Her

Alpha Emmerick>

My mate is a filthy human.

Weak, fragile, and bleeding. A member of the very species my kind had hunted and avoided for centuries. I should have left her in that warehouse for the heat-crazed human males to tear apart. I should have walked away the instant her scent told me what she was.

I could not.

Her world was already gone and the males roaming the ruins were no longer men in any meaningful sense. The Crimson Veil had driven them into heat and reduced them to predators ruled by sex. They would smell my mate, hunt her, and tear her apart the instant I left her unprotected.

Her body proved how vulnerable she was. Blood stained the space between her thighs, bruises marked her skin, and the frantic beat at her throat betrayed how hard she was fighting to remain upright. Even so, she fought me while trapped under my body with her wrists pinned above her head.

That stubbornness was the only reason I had not dismissed her as worthless. It meant there might be more strength in my mate than her human body suggested.

Riven, my wolf, was losing his mind inside my skull.

Claim her. Mark her. Take her. Now.

He snarled the words through our connection without minding she was human or that she might die before the next full moon. She was ours, and that was all he understood. Every instinct we shared urged me to sink my teeth into her throat and seal the bond before another male touched what was mine.

I would not.

I would not waste the mark on a human who might not survive the week, nor would I bind my power or my pack to someone so breakable. A mate was supposed to strengthen an Alpha and give his pack the power to press farther into contested territory. Binding myself to a dying human would weaken everything I had spent years protecting.

So I would do only what was necessary.

Keep her alive, wash the blood from her body, feed her, and give her somewhere protected to recover. When she could stand on her own again, I would return her to the ruined world she knew and let her live whatever time remained to her.

That was all.

Under me, she twisted and glared up with pure fury.

“Get the fuck off me,” she spat. “What the fuck does mate mean? Answer me, you bastard.”

Her voice was hoarse from screaming, and anger kept her eyes bright despite the exhaustion written over her. My human had no idea what she was asking or what that single word had already awakened in me.

I kept her wrists pinned and stared down at my stubborn, bleeding mate, somehow alive when almost every other female of her species was dead.

A growl rolled from my chest before I stopped it and the vibration moved through her where our bodies met. Most creatures would have flinched when an Alpha growled over them, but she only glared harder.

“I said get the fuck off me. You don’t get to pin me down and throw around words I don’t understand.”

Her defiance tested every instinct I had. I was Alpha who gave order, and everyone obeyed, but she cursed at me like my authority meant nothing 

No one in my pack spoke to me this way. Warriors, elders, even Malrik, who had known me since we were both half-grown and stupid, understood what it meant to challenge an Alpha directly. 

My human twisted under me and talked over every order I gave her. She treated my strength like an inconvenience she intended to overcome and my growl like meaningless noise.

Riven snarled his approval, far too pleased by my mate’s defiance.

I strengthened my grip on her wrists and leaned closer until little space was between our faces.

“You do not give me orders,” I told her. “You do not question me while I am keeping you alive. You stay where I put you until I decide it is safe for you to move.”

She bared her teeth at me. “Or what? You’ll growl again? Fuck you.”

Riven surged against the restraint I kept on him, pleased by a challenge no one else would dare give us. She had no idea what she was doing to me. The more she fought and cursed at me, the harder it became to keep Riven from taking over.

I remained still and swallowed the next growl.

If I gave Riven more freedom, he would try to claim her on this floor, and her fragile human body might not survive a true mating.

She used the small space between us and lunged upward, her teeth sinking into my shoulder where it met my neck. Her jaws pressed harder while the warmth of her mouth covered my skin. Any other male might have jerked away or snarled, but I stayed still.

Her bite barely affected me. Human teeth could not pierce the denser muscle and bone of my kind, but my mate bit harder anyway, determined to force some reaction from me while I kept her wrists pinned and let her spend her strength.

Riven howled inside my skull.

He was triumphant. My wolf loved that my mate had put her mouth on us, and he loved the fight in her even more. My body responded to the bite, and my arousal hardened against her stomach while instinct urged me to claim what the bond had chosen for us.

Hair rose along my arms and the back of my neck as Riven clawed at the barrier between us, trying to force his way forward.

I stared down at my human biting my shoulder and that was it.

This ended now. Time to fix her and my damn wolf up. I released one of her wrists and struck the nerve of her neck. Her body jerked once. Her teeth released my shoulder, and her eyes widened briefly before rolling back. The fight drained from her, leaving her limp under me with her head turned aside and her breathing shallow but steady.

I remained over her briefly, staring at the woman who had somehow pushed me to this point. “We are not claiming her,” I said to Riven.

He replied with a furious snarl.

She is mate. Weak or not, she is ours. Claim her. Mark her. The bond will make us stronger. The pack will finally have the power to take the territories we have been denied for decades.

“I understand what a mate is supposed to bring,” I told him. “I understand the strength of the bond and what it could mean for the pack. It changes nothing. She is human. Her body is already failing, and she will not survive our world.”

Riven erupted in furious noise, flooding my mind with images of my mate marked and claimed, my pack rising in power, and rival factions forced to kneel. He had no interest in her fragile bones or the blood seeping between her thighs. To him, only one fact mattered: my human carried the scent of mate.

I shut him out.

The connection between us narrowed behind a locked barrier until his voice became muffled and the strain against my skin faded. I sighed and looked at my unconscious mate again.

There was only one course I was willing to take.

Protect her until she could stand, then let her go.

I rose from the floor and stood over her before gradually shifting into my wolf form.

My bones lengthened and reformed with cracks, muscle tore and rebuilt, and hair erupted along my arms, chest, and spine. My face pushed forward into a muzzle while my teeth lengthened, and the last of my human form gave way until I stood on four paws.

My unconscious mate lay at my feet, small against the concrete, her injuries impossible to ignore.

I dipped my head, took the back of her shirt and the loose skin at the nape of her neck between my jaws carefully, then lifted her. She hung like a pup, limp but secure, while the taste of her blood and sweat coated my tongue. Riven stirred behind the barrier I had forced into place, but I kept him contained and moved.

I left the warehouse at a dead run.

The industrial outskirts faded past in broken fences, overturned trucks, and fires raging where gas lines had ruptured. Smoke and death poisoned the air. Human females lay along the roadside and across the asphalt, already cooling, while the males still moving had glassy eyes from the Veil’s heat. None was foolish enough to block an Alpha with his mate between his jaws.

I entered the tree line without slowing.

The forest was consumed by fogs while branches whipped past and old leaves softened the ground under my paws. I ran higher into the hills where human roads ended and old territories began, devouring mile after mile while the sky above the canopy held a faint red stain from the Veil.

My mate’s body swayed with my stride, and the scent of her blood was strong in my mouth. I adjusted my grip once so my teeth would not pierce her skin, then resumed the ground-eating pace toward home.

When I reached my territory, I reduced my pace so my patrols could mark my arrival. My pack members emerged from the undergrowth on both sides of the trail, heads bowed and tails level. Already shifted for the evening patrol, they pressed their bodies to the earth in full submission as I passed.

Their eyes never left the human hanging from my jaws.

Surprise and disgust moved through my pack members, joined by an old hostility bred into my pack for generations. Humans were not merely outsiders, they were the enemy. They had hunted us, poisoned our forests, and driven us into hidden territories long before this century of humans.

No wolf in my pack had ever been asked to accept one inside our borders, much less see their Alpha bring his human mate home between his teeth.

I entered the center of my pack territory.

My hunters, runners, and a few of my pack she-wolves were already there in wolf form. Heads dipped as I entered, bodies folding toward the ground the way they had been taught, but their eyes betrayed them. They kept looking at my mate hanging from my jaws.

Some stared too long. Others glanced at one another before looking back at her.

No one needed to speak.

I stopped among them and lifted my head, keeping my unconscious human secure between my teeth. They bowed deeper, but I could almost hear what none of them had the courage to say to my face.

They did not want her here. They already wanted her gone.

And I have just brought my mate into a pack that has spent centuries killing her kind.